Despite what many (including myself) thought when EA announced they would support the Mac platform, the games EA will release are actually not native ports - instead, they will use Transgaming's Cider engine, a Wine-like wrapper for running Windows games on Intel Macs. This news was found in a Transgaming press release. Apart from the fact that this might negatively affect performance, it also means PowerPC Macs will not be able to play these games.

"Transgaming is faster than running the games native? It's just fanboys doing what they do best, spinning in order that it might become true."

Yawn. Wine/Cedega isn't rocket science. It is just a reimplementation of Win32-APIs and DirectX. Sometimes a reimplementation is faster than the original. The Wine developers looked at the Win32-API and DirectX API and wrote their own version of it with the same interfaces as the original.

Thus, Wine Is Not an Emulator.

There is nothing inherit in Wine/Cedega or indeed Cider that means that games have to run slower. The DirectX to OpenGL "translation" is just what programmers like to call "wrappers", and if properly done doesn't have to add any substantial overhead.

So, if the Wine developers are good and do a good job at the implementation, it could turn out faster than the original.

Unfortunately, Wine/Cedega/Cider isn't always a 100% complete and the implementation isn't always exactly the same as the original. This leads to compatibility problems and bugs. And a substantial portion of the time, the reimplementation is actually slower than the original.

What EA is doing is to fix their games so that they run perfectly with Cider. This means replacing API-calls that are known to work poorly with Cider with something else and make sure that the API-calls that are left work well.

The only thing required by a company for their games to work perfectly with Linux and OS X is to add Wine to their testing platforms. If every company used Wine as a target in addition to Windows XP/Vista, we would have every single Windows game available to run perfectly and NATIVE on Linux.